


The Lioness At Sea

by aurora_borealis



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-26
Updated: 2017-12-26
Packaged: 2019-02-22 06:25:57
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,088
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13161147
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aurora_borealis/pseuds/aurora_borealis
Summary: "You will marry and you will breed. Every child you birth makes Stannis more a liar." Their father's eyes seemed to pin her to her chair. "Mace Tyrell, Paxter Redwyne, and Doran Martell are wed to younger women likely to outlive them. Balon Greyjoy's wife is elderly and failing, but such a match would commit us to an alliance with the Iron Islands, and I am still uncertain whether that would be our wisest course." - A Storm of SwordsAU- Tywin does in fact marry Cersei off to Balon.





	The Lioness At Sea

“I came to ask what you’re doing here,” says the woman, Asha, her new step-daughter. In the dark her black eyes glint, the shadows fall over her face, obscuring half of what she truly looks like. Her tone is as presumptuous as any of her coarse brethren, like all the rest of her people, no matter what else she is- but Cersei can see that she truly wants to know.

“I hadn’t planned to come,” is what she says. I hadn’t wanted to come to your vile outpost of gray rocks, she thinks. “But my father sent me for the alliance.” Balon had been different from what she expected- he barely pays her any mind, no more than he seems to pay attention to the aged wife he set aside when the match cooked up by her lord father came to be. The Greyjoys, for all their talk, always end up kneeling to the demands of the Crown. But not this one, Cersei suspects, looking at her husband’s daughter and only remaining heir, whose suspicious, dark eyes had observed her throughout the wedding that had occurred the other day.

There’s a brief half-smile that doesn’t reach her eyes, those observant, narrowed, calm eyes. “We do what we must,” she says- there’s something under there, that Cersei knows she’ll have to uncover. The crone had said to her…and who was this woman? The heir of a king. No, she isn’t really beautiful, and her kingdom is the sea and some ruined castles and shoddy villages. No…

She wasn’t meant to be here, she’ll get out soon enough. Her new husband may be younger than her father, but he certainly doesn’t look it- life has aged him, she can tell. This alliance was one she’d tried to dissuade her father from, but there was no moving of Lord Tywin. And so she is here in Pyke, still wearing her red, but under a gray sky and in cold air.

Queen you shall be- and now, she is Queen in Pyke…if she could figure how this all fits together, she could defy the prophecy. If she could figure out what the significance of this new life is, how to break free of it, how to counter whatever game this black-eyed reaver girl is doing, she’d know…

She smiles at Asha. “Is that so?” she asks. “And what has been required of you?” She realizes that the woman has never taken a husband- and wonders if she should suspect of her the same thing she suspected of Margaery Tyrell, this woman in her mail and leather.

Asha is silent for a moment, her face solemn in the dark- is this what she really looks like, Cersei wonders? Is this the real Kraken’s daughter, this grave, serious woman before her? “If I told you I would be telling you a great deal. Which was why I asked you,” she said, and there is almost an ironic humor in her voice.

They will never trust her, not a single one of these ironmen, nor the women, they will not trust a “greenlander”, not least of all Robert’s wife. And she will never trust them.

“You wish to be a queen, don’t you?” Cersei asks.

Asha does not blink. “I am my father’s heir. That may not be how it works in King’s Landing, I know, but this is not King’s Landing.” Of course it isn’t, Cersei wants to tell her, even that vile, loud, filthy city is less dreary than your dank tomb of an island. “I have been his heir since I was twelve. I have had to think very hard about what must be done for our people.” What could possibly be done for your people, for your land of the dead at this point? Cersei wants to ask her. Unless she means to say that she has had to think hard about supplanting this new queen from the green lands.

“I know you didn’t want to marry my father,” Asha says after a moment. “He didn’t care much to remarry, either.” But of course, Balon didn’t dare risk angering Lord Tywin, Cersei is well aware; he knelt once when he knew his people had no chance. That is a precedent.

“And what of you?” Cersei asks. It’s different here. No one hides behind courtesies, they’re honest, in all their terribleness.

“What of me?” It is clear that Asha is trying to read into her, as well. Try it, squid, Cersei thinks, you will find I am far greater of an adversary than you are used to. Until there comes another…not unless I come for you, she could say. “I don’t deal in secrets.” No, none of her people do. It is ten years past the rebellion and three hundred years past the first conquest and what is dead may never die, and everything is dead.

She could make use of Asha, once she figures out what to do here- if Asha allows for it, if she isn’t too much of an adversary, if she or any of her living-dead family are capable of being a true adversary. “And yet here we are,” she says. It’s strange, to be able to say it so openly.  

“I mean to learn who you are,” Asha says, as if explaining.

Cersei looks her dead in the eye. “Oh, and I am too,” she says, “and I will, Greyjoy.” You see, old woman, Cersei thinks back, if you think to send me to my death at her hands, you will see…

She is alone in Pyke. But these masses of ironmen, in a way, they are alone- their king can and will do nothing for them. This woman who would rule them, whatever that could mean, will not ruin her, and she will leave here, leave this land of the dead, with young women with old, dark eyes.

Asha shakes her head, just for a moment. “I don’t hide who I am, Cersei,” she tells her. Or you don’t seem to think you do, Cersei thinks, you treacherous krakens are so used to ill-gotten truths you can barely discern them from lies.

Cersei smiles at her. “Nor do lions,” she says, “remember that.” From outside the stony windows, she can hear the wind howling over the gray, roiling sea. A storm, as the ironmen would say, the wrath of the storm god. Before she leaves this place once and for all, she will show them all who they have taken in as queen.

 


End file.
